112,664 research outputs found

    Revisiting the Open Court Principle in an Era of Online Publication: Questioning Presumptive Public Access to Parties’ and Witnesses’ Personal Information

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    Openness Of cOurts can serve laudable purposes, not the least of which are transparency of government and court systems and access to justice, although accounts of the open court principle’s meaning, breadth, and underlying pur- poses have expanded and shifted over time.CurrentlyinCanadathe adherence to the principle has meant presumptive access to almost all aspects of court cases, including access to personal information about parties and witness- es, encompassing not only information contained in court judgments, but also information contained in documents led in court oces. Historically, not- withstanding this presumptive access, practical obscurity has protected much of this information, in that most people will not trouble themselves to physically attend court onces in order to review records led there. While the practical obscurity generated by having to physically access court records made it dif- cult for the public to interact with and understand the law and legal outcomes by, for example, imposing a barrier to public access to court judgments, it also protected privacy by minimizing the likelihood of widespread public inspection of personal information about witnesses and litigants. Moving court records online makes those records more easily accessible and thereby undermines practical obscurity. This change o ers the bene t of improving public access to law and legal reasoning, but in the online context, maintaining a default in favour of presumptive access could also have devastating effects on privacy. Unfettered online access re- moves the inconveniences and personal accountability associated with gaining physical access to paper records, not only opening up public access to court judgments, but also opening up sensitive personal information to the voyeuristic gaze of the public. We take the position that in this context, presumptive access to personal information about parties and witnesses jeopardizes the funda- mental human right to privacy without substantially contributing to the under- lying values of the open court principle: transparency and access to justice. Ultimately, we suggest that mechanisms to reintroduce friction into the process of gaining access to personal information ought to be taken to rebalance the public interest in open courts with the public interest in the protection of privacy

    Ethics for Records and Information Management

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    The scope and reach of information, driven by the explosive growth of information technologies and content types, has expanded dramatically over the past 30 years. The consequences of these changes to records and information management (RIM) professionals are profound, necessitating not only specialized knowledge but added responsibilities. RIM professionals require a professional ethics to guide them in their daily practice and to form a basis for developing and implementing organizational policies, and Mooradian’s new book provides a rigorous outline of such an ethics. Taking an authoritative principles/rules based approach to the subject, this book comprehensively addresses •the structure of ethics, outlining principles, moral rules, judgements, and exceptions; •ethical reasoning, from meaning and logic to dilemmas and decision methods; •the ethical core of RIM, discussing key topics such as organizational context, the positive value of accountability, conflicts of interest, and confidentiality; •important ethical concerns like copyright and intellectual property, whistleblowing, information leaks, disclosure, and privacy; and •the relationship between RIM ethics and information governance. An essential handbook for information professionals who manage records, archives, data, and other content, this book is also an ideal teaching text for students of information ethic

    International perspectives on social media guidance for nurses: a content analysis

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    Aim: This article reports the results of an analysis of the content of national and international professional guidance on social media for the nursing profession. The aim was to consolidate good practice examples of social media guidelines, and inform the development of comprehensive guidance. Method: A scoping search of professional nursing bodies’ and organisations’ social media guidance documents was undertaken using google search. Results: 34 guidance documents were located, and a content analysis of these was conducted. Conclusion: The results, combined with a review of competency hearings and literature, indicate that guidance should cover the context of social media, and support nurses to navigate and negotiate the differences between the real and online domains to help them translate awareness into actions

    The control over personal data: True remedy or fairy tale ?

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    This research report undertakes an interdisciplinary review of the concept of "control" (i.e. the idea that people should have greater "control" over their data), proposing an analysis of this con-cept in the field of law and computer science. Despite the omnipresence of the notion of control in the EU policy documents, scholarly literature and in the press, the very meaning of this concept remains surprisingly vague and under-studied in the face of contemporary socio-technical environments and practices. Beyond the current fashionable rhetoric of empowerment of the data subject, this report attempts to reorient the scholarly debates towards a more comprehensive and refined understanding of the concept of control by questioning its legal and technical implications on data subject\^as agency

    Artificial intelligence and UK national security: Policy considerations

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    RUSI was commissioned by GCHQ to conduct an independent research study into the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for national security purposes. The aim of this project is to establish an independent evidence base to inform future policy development regarding national security uses of AI. The findings are based on in-depth consultation with stakeholders from across the UK national security community, law enforcement agencies, private sector companies, academic and legal experts, and civil society representatives. This was complemented by a targeted review of existing literature on the topic of AI and national security. The research has found that AI offers numerous opportunities for the UK national security community to improve efficiency and effectiveness of existing processes. AI methods can rapidly derive insights from large, disparate datasets and identify connections that would otherwise go unnoticed by human operators. However, in the context of national security and the powers given to UK intelligence agencies, use of AI could give rise to additional privacy and human rights considerations which would need to be assessed within the existing legal and regulatory framework. For this reason, enhanced policy and guidance is needed to ensure the privacy and human rights implications of national security uses of AI are reviewed on an ongoing basis as new analysis methods are applied to data

    A Blockchain-based Approach for Data Accountability and Provenance Tracking

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    The recent approval of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes new data protection requirements on data controllers and processors with respect to the processing of European Union (EU) residents' data. These requirements consist of a single set of rules that have binding legal status and should be enforced in all EU member states. In light of these requirements, we propose in this paper the use of a blockchain-based approach to support data accountability and provenance tracking. Our approach relies on the use of publicly auditable contracts deployed in a blockchain that increase the transparency with respect to the access and usage of data. We identify and discuss three different models for our approach with different granularity and scalability requirements where contracts can be used to encode data usage policies and provenance tracking information in a privacy-friendly way. From these three models we designed, implemented, and evaluated a model where contracts are deployed by data subjects for each data controller, and a model where subjects join contracts deployed by data controllers in case they accept the data handling conditions. Our implementations show in practice the feasibility and limitations of contracts for the purposes identified in this paper

    In Defense of the Long Privacy Statement

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    An Audit Logic for Accountability

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    We describe and implement a policy language. In our system, agents can distribute data along with usage policies in a decentralized architecture. Our language supports the specification of conditions and obligations, and also the possibility to refine policies. In our framework, the compliance with usage policies is not actively enforced. However, agents are accountable for their actions, and may be audited by an authority requiring justifications.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of IEEE Policy 200

    The Profiling Potential of Computer Vision and the Challenge of Computational Empiricism

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    Computer vision and other biometrics data science applications have commenced a new project of profiling people. Rather than using 'transaction generated information', these systems measure the 'real world' and produce an assessment of the 'world state' - in this case an assessment of some individual trait. Instead of using proxies or scores to evaluate people, they increasingly deploy a logic of revealing the truth about reality and the people within it. While these profiling knowledge claims are sometimes tentative, they increasingly suggest that only through computation can these excesses of reality be captured and understood. This article explores the bases of those claims in the systems of measurement, representation, and classification deployed in computer vision. It asks if there is something new in this type of knowledge claim, sketches an account of a new form of computational empiricism being operationalised, and questions what kind of human subject is being constructed by these technological systems and practices. Finally, the article explores legal mechanisms for contesting the emergence of computational empiricism as the dominant knowledge platform for understanding the world and the people within it
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